As Eric Freeman of the excellent Ball Don’t Lie points out, there are positive and negative aspects to being 7-foot-6. On the negative side, even mundane, day-to-day activities like buying clothes, walking through doorways, sitting in cars and fitting into pre-19th century buildings become impossibilities. There are a few positives, though, like being able to make millions of dollars for a couple of years as a basketball player, and that when a Monstar steals your talent all he’s really stolen is your ability to be tall (and you’re still that, you didn’t shrink) so you’re more-or-less unharmed.
Being that tall also, as we’re learning today, makes stories about people stealing your special tall-people things super, super sad.
Last Friday, someone burglarized the barn on [former basketball star Shawn] Bradley’s property. The only item that was taken was a bicycle made specially for him in 2006.
“Whether you’re 7 feet 6 inches or normal height, stealing someone’s bike is low,” an upset Bradley said Wednesday. […]
After Bradley retired from the NBA in 2006, the 7-foot-6 center said he needed to find a way to keep the weight off. Trek made a bicycle just for him.
A bicycle made just for him.
Ignoring the fact that Shawn Bradley has a barn to house his special bicycle like he’s Pee-wee Herman and ignoring the fact that somebody broke onto an NBA millionaire’s property and all he took was his special 8-feet-tall megacycle, how f**king sad is this. It gets even worse when you read his follow-up, which sounds exactly like a five-year old explaining why this particular stolen big wheel is the biggest deal ever — he namedrops his brother. His BROTHER.
“My brother is 6 feet 10 inches and he can’t ride it,” Bradley said.
The best part of the story is that when the sadness of having your monster trike stolen subsides, you get to blame it on the only person who would do such a thing.
Despite his dismay, Bradley was still able to joke Wednesday about who the possible suspects might be. He said the only other person in Utah who could have rode off on his bike was former Utah Jazz center Mark Eaton, whom he called to tell about the burglary.
Bradley also joked that maybe another former Jazzman, Greg Ostertag, might have stolen the bike as a prank. But he said even Ostertag wouldn’t have been able to reach the pedals.
I want the ending of this story to be that both Eaton AND Ostertag stole the back in some sort of elaborate heist scenario. You’re hanging out in Utah and all of a sudden this huge bike rolls by, being driven by a tall guy with another guy sitting on his shoulders.
